3D-Blender Blender Art - Show Us Your Blender Skill

Apr 21, 2022
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anyone get weird quad muscles when posing characters?
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Select your mesh, check the Armature modifier, and make sure the "Preserve Volume" checkbox is checked. Having it on is usually better than not, although it might make the shoulders a little big when they raise their arms over their head. (Why would anyone ever turn it off? Well, it doesn't translate to most real-time game engines, for one thing...)

But after having typed that, I take a closer look, and it almost looks like the circular bone shapes themselves are being distorted. Show me the modifier lists for your character, both the Armature and the Mesh. Something is up, here.

Adding a Corrective Smooth modifier might cover up the problem, but I want to see the source of it.
 
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Ghoseh

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Mar 29, 2021
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i figured it out kinda or at least how to fix it. im gonna need to spend more time working out the differences between which rigs to use. but for the fix i changed the knee up value up to an amount past 0.770. Screenshot_3.png Screenshot_4.png
it happens with other poses presets as well Screenshot_6.png but not with other male models Screenshot_7.png
and does not happen with women models Screenshot_5.png
posing your self and it does not happen. but posing takes a good chunk of time and presets and helpful.
 

MidnightArrow

Member
Aug 22, 2021
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but posing takes a good chunk of time and presets and helpful.
I think you're just mentally scarred from your time in Daz Studio. Posing in Blender is quick and easy, that's why people use it.

Does the character come with custom JCMs, and did you import them?

Ah. You're talking about Light Nodes, which are only available in Cycles, right? I wasn't sure if the render was Cycles or Eevee, so I tried to cover the bases with the most universally applicable tools for the job.
I wouldn't use Eevee for this, for sure not for Daz characters. You need to use the right tool for the job, and that tool is Cycles.
 

Ghoseh

Newbie
Mar 29, 2021
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I think you're just mentally scarred from your time in Daz Studio. Posing in Blender is quick and easy, that's why people use it.

Does the character come with custom JCMs, and did you import them?
LOL, maybe. and no i didnt use custom jcm's. iirc this what i do when i transfer characters over.
but an issue iv ran into lately with all my characters that i imported with the daz rigging. wont pose so i convert top MHX, To fix that issue. my issue my be that. MHX and rigify give me two slightly different variations of the same pose preset. i did not find diffeomorphic's guide that helpful so i just tried stuff until it worked for me.
Screenshot_8.png
 
Apr 21, 2022
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I wouldn't use Eevee for this, for sure not for Daz characters. You need to use the right tool for the job, and that tool is Cycles.
But they're so close in terms of feature sets, and the renders take so much longer in Cycles. And we're never going to achieve true photorealism, anyway, so surely the type of graphics you'd see in a realtime AAA game is close enough, right? Well, Eevee is designed to provide that. I just need to get good enough at using it. Then I'll be cranking out animations while people on Cycles are still rendering one frame!
 

MidnightArrow

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Aug 22, 2021
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LOL, maybe. and no i didnt use custom jcm's. iirc this what i do when i transfer characters over.
but an issue iv ran into lately with all my characters that i imported with the daz rigging. wont pose so i convert top MHX, To fix that issue. my issue my be that. MHX and rigify give me two slightly different variations of the same pose preset. i did not find diffeomorphic's guide that helpful so i just tried stuff until it worked for me.
After importing go to the importer's morphs section, find the "import custom morphs" button, and find your way to the character's folder. If there's any custom pJCMs you need to import those to correct unwanted deforms when posing the character. What figure is it?
 

MidnightArrow

Member
Aug 22, 2021
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420
Recently I found the Diffeomorphic exporter materials wanting, so I rolled up my sleeves and did the thing I've been putting off for a very long time: cracked open the Uber shader file (it's just plaintext in your Daz install directory), learned Nivida's shader language, and spent the last five days reimplementing the whole thing from scratch in Blender.

Eh, it's coming along alright.

(from left to right: Iray, Cycles, Eevee)

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Domiek

In a Scent
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Recently I found the Diffeomorphic exporter materials wanting, so I rolled up my sleeves and did the thing I've been putting off for a very long time: cracked open the Uber shader file (it's just plaintext in your Daz install directory), learned Nivida's shader language, and spent the last five days reimplementing the whole thing from scratch in Blender.

Eh, it's coming along alright.

(from left to right: Iray, Cycles, Eevee)

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That's starting to look great and is definitely an improvement on the diffeo shader.
 
Apr 21, 2022
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Recently I found the Diffeomorphic exporter materials wanting, so I rolled up my sleeves and did the thing I've been putting off for a very long time: cracked open the Uber shader file (it's just plaintext in your Daz install directory), learned Nivida's shader language, and spent the last five days reimplementing the whole thing from scratch in Blender.

Eh, it's coming along alright.

(from left to right: Iray, Cycles, Eevee)

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Okay, I know eevee can look better than that. I'm less certain of how. Maybe multiply the SSS and Specular results by the AO in the scene? It's a place to start digging, anyway.

I do like the results you're getting. When you say "Iray," do you mean Iray in Daz or Iray in Blender? Cuz that leftmost image looks better than most Daz renders!
 

MidnightArrow

Member
Aug 22, 2021
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That's starting to look great and is definitely an improvement on the diffeo shader.
It does, but too bad the Uber MDL file has a big fat "DO NOT DISCLOSE TO THIRD PARTIES" at the top. I offered to tell the Diffeo guys anything they want to know but I also said it may be breaking the EULA to implement it into the exporter.

I did tell them how to implement the Schlick fresnel approximation (the blue glow around the head's edges) since that's public knowledge and not proprietary to Daz.

Okay, I know eevee can look better than that. I'm less certain of how. Maybe multiply the SSS and Specular results by the AO in the scene? It's a place to start digging, anyway.

I do like the results you're getting. When you say "Iray," do you mean Iray in Daz or Iray in Blender? Cuz that leftmost image looks better than most Daz renders!
I put no effort into the Eevee side of things, I don't use it. The Uber shader uses translucency to make skin look soft. That's countered by the "SSS" (which is a lie, it's actually volumetrics) consuming the light inside the skin layer. But Eevee can't do volumetrics so the skin has a translucency problem.

There is no Iray in Blender, that's a Daz render for comparison.
 
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Apr 21, 2022
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The Uber shader uses translucency to make skin look soft. That's countered by the "SSS" (which is a lie, it's actually volumetrics) consuming the light inside the skin layer. But Eevee can't do volumetrics so the skin has a translucency problem.
Yeah, I know. Missing features. So you fake it. It's basically Rule #1 of realtime graphics. If the computer/engine/language can't do it, find a cheap way to fake it.

For example, here's the result of a Difference operation between the second image and the third. If you multiply blend this image with the Eevee result, you'd get the Cycles result::
SophieCyclesEeveeDifference.jpg

Looks like my gut was right about the AO pass, at least partially. Turns out you'd actually want to Add blend the Diffuse color (or maybe it's SSS color; it's a little hard to tell from here) to the AO before Multiplying it into the results. And then you'll still have these missing shadows around the eye sockets and jawline. Is that just the Diffuse lighting pass? Looking at the shadow under the chin, probably. I realize that you're not putting any effort into Eevee, but I'm surprised you turned off shadows entirely. Or maybe that's not the type of thing that's provided by Nvidia's standard shader language, and you'd have to actually put effort into implementing shadows yourself. Or at least combining your shader with an existing example shader that uses shadows. If that's the case, then fair enough. You did your best.

Here's something that you personally might find a little more useful. It's the result of a difference operation between the first image and the second:
SophieIrayCyclesDifference.jpg

I'm not sure what this actually is, but to me it sort of looks like if you took the bump map, did a High Pass on it, and added the diffuse map to it, you'd get something not entirely unlike this. Oh, and I noticed you need to Overlay at 50% or so, not Multiply. Looks like different missing data needs to be blended differently, which makes sense. No, wait. I just realized that you're not using the shape morphs in Blender. Everything that looks like High Pass could be a side-effect of the morph changing shape, thereby nudging the skin details until they're out of sync with each other.

I notice the morph doesn't affect the ear, though...
EarDifference.jpg

Result * ( ( ( Bump * (1 - Layer Weight ) ) + Diffuse Color) * 0.5) * 1.5. Final answer.

And, of course, applying both those effects at once could turn the Eevee result into a rough approximation of the Iray result.

(In theory, anyway. In practice, this is only one point of data from a very specific test-case. Lessons gleaned from this exercise might not apply in the general case, etc. Which means, at best, if you blindly messed with the shader based on these comparisons, you'd end up with some sort of frankenstien shader that only works on skin, or even a very specific range of skin tones, and you might need to massage the input bitmaps so they more closely resemble whatever conventions the developers of Sophie's original Skin were using when they designed their skin maps. Maybe replace some of those floats with variables so the artist can tweak it with sliders at the Material level. But, that's realtime graphics development for you. Gotta fake it when you literally can't make it.)

The broader point I'm trying to make is, when you hit the end of the road chasing realism, you can often push it further by embracing hyperrealism-- the pursuit of what it looks like, not what it is.

(That's kind of what the Iray Ubershader is, in the first place, when you think about it. A hackey cheat for approximating reality. If it were somehow literally "photo-real lighting," using it would begin and end with images scanned-in from real people and objects. There would be no need for all the colors and sliders and extra secular models to choose from. Instead, they wisely chose to give the artists wiggle room so they could fake various effects for which no map exists, or modulate existing maps for new use-cases.)
 
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Apr 21, 2022
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yall in here doing math???
I'm imagining the node tree in my head.

The math is just how you'd symbolize the node tree in a shader language.

(Or, more accurately, the math is what the shader nodes are actually doing when you link up the noodles.)

I mean, approximately. It's just pseudo-code. I haven't actually looked at the shader docs yet.
 
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Apr 21, 2022
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A savant?
I'll just tell myself you meant the

NewSkinShader.jpg

I think this is probably just about as far as I can push Daz skin in Eevee right now. It's not perfect, it's not an exact replacement for Iray, and it's certainly not photo-realistic. But it's rich and it's detailed and it responds well to various lighting conditions. Most importantly for my purposes, it renders at 1080p within seconds with no noise.
 
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Apr 21, 2022
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Teeth test. I would love some critical feedback on this.

toothtest.jpg

Skin and lighting, too. Heck, open season on feedback, in general.

I should put that in my sig. :unsure: